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We‘ve come a long way since VisionMobile was founded in 2005. I founded the company just after I had left Orange (the telco) as a means to build a strategy consultancy for the era of mobile. That was two years before Android and iOS were introduced to the world, and ended up impacting every single industry out there.

Despite all the hype around the death of the PC and the enormous amount of media attention focused on mobile, cloud and IoT, the humble desktop is still the biggest part of the developer economy. There are more professional developers working on desktop applications than any other sector.

What if you could identify a handful of developer personas, or segments, each with a very distinct set of needs and interests? What if on top of that set of developer personas you also had some guidance as to how to address each one of them, what to include in your outreach campaigns targeted at them in order to make them more effective?

Alexa is a centerpiece of Amazon’s Smart Home push, and quickly growing to become one of the most promising attempts at making a successful Smart Home hub, connecting all other devices around the house together. What’s more, Amazon has opened Alexa to developers, who can incorporate it in their own devices as well as add new functionality to the assistant, in the form of so-called Skills (services, integrations, or use cases).

Instant Apps will succeed where ActiveX failed. Better compartmentalisation and centralised management will secure it, and users will appreciate it, but the real winner will be Google who squashes alternative app stores and outmanoeuvres alternative Android distributions, all in the interest of providing greater web-site functionality.